I'm mentoring this co-workers of mine using darcs for the first time, so I am
able to notice all of these small issues that first-time users notice but
long-time users don't.

The catch with using -f as equivalent to --force (which does feel very
unixy) is that I try to keep to the policy that short flags are the same
for all commands that accept them (and I prefer not to remove short
flags).  We don't currently use -f for anything, so it's free.  The only
question is whether we'd ever want it for anything else.  All I can imagine
would be something like "--file", which seems unlikely.

This is something that I'd like to have other people's opinion on.  Which
I'll have to get, since I'm not going to do this myself.  It's a trivial
patch, but if noone cares to do this, I'll conclude it isn't really a
valuable idea.  Feel free to bring the subject up on darcs-users and/or
darcs-devel to try to get support, if noone takes action.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net

thread:

http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-devel/2006-February/004088.html

I'm leaning in favor of this change, since -f seems to be commonly used for
--force in unixy apps, but I'd like to be sure that at least one or both of
the darcs maintainers weighs in on this, since adding a new short flag is a
big deal.

David

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 01:08:35PM +0000, David Roundy wrote:
> I'm leaning in favor of this change, since -f seems to be commonly used for
> --force in unixy apps, but I'd like to be sure that at least one or both of
> the darcs maintainers weighs in on this, since adding a new short flag is a
> big deal.

The user demand for short flags has not been overwhelming.
I only miss short flags for --last and possibly --match(es),
but --force would come next in turn.  And since I too can't
think of any other good use for -f, and strongly associate
it with --force (from 'rm -rf'), I'll support this change.

implemented in 1.0.7